 For the last month I have foraged 100% of my food from the land, every single bite. Now in order to create a complete diet and really reconnect with the earth and my plant friends, I foraged about a hundred different plants as food and medicine. Today I'm going to introduce you to about 40 of the plants that I connected with over the last month. Pile of manure growing next to it, wintercress, landcress, creasy greens, goes by many names but by all names scrumptious. Cousa dogwood, delicious. Wild rice, manomen, the food that grows on water. I give so much gratitude to the Anishinaabe people who have been the stewards of this wonderful food for hundreds or thousands of years, without their knowledge and their stewardship. This is a plant friend that I would not have. This is my absolute staple both to my soul and to my body as it is the main source of calories per my month of eating 100% from the land. This is ginkgo. I am harvesting the fruits and the nuts. Goldenrod in the golden hour. This is a wonderful all-around medicinal plant to make medicinal teas from. A bounty of black walnuts in the parking lot ready for the picking. Cleavers and one of the ways you can identify this is if you throw it at your chest it often sticks just like that and cleavers are edible. Creeping Charlie. People consider this to be a noxious pest of a plant but it's a wonderful medicinal and edible. Crab apples, much to many people's disbelief, they are not poisonous. Some crab apples taste amazing, others kind of crabby, all of them worth a try. It's chickweed. You know it's chickweed because on the alternating sides there's this little row of hairs and it tastes like sweet corn. Chicken to the woods, one of the most popular and exciting mushrooms to find. Chestnuts. I consider them sort of like a potato in the sense that they're calorically dense and take very little processing work. Hey look I found some false strawberry. Now it's not a false strawberry, it's a thing of a tone and it looks like a strawberry but it doesn't have the delicious taste of a strawberry. Still worth eating though. Echinacea. I use the flowers and leaves to make an immune boosting tea. Ground cherries which are a wonderful treat to find, they grow in these husks just like tomatillos do. They are quite the treat. Ho-ho. Here we have Hawthorn which looks a lot like rose hips but I really prefer them to rose hips and Hawthorn can vary a lot from tree to tree. Some are incredible and this one it's all right. Hen of the woods or mitaki, a great edible mushroom and a great medicinal. Hackberries. A sweet fruit on the outside and a crunchy seed on the inside. Jewel weed. Watch the seeds explode. Autumn berries. These are considered highly invasive so eating them is good for our ecosystems. Smart weed is another really edible weed and it's also called lady finger because it has these smudges on the leaf that looks kind of like a fingerprint. Lambs quarter. One of my favorite greens in a weed in every city. Mustard seeds. With this I can make my own mustard or just add some real nice spice to my meals. Mint. My spirit plant that makes a refreshing minty water. This is one food that is growing everywhere. It is mulberry growing out of the cracks here in urban New York City and most people know that the wonderful berries are delicious but the young and tender greens also incredibly nutritious. This is mugwort and I use this as part of my sleepy time tea blend that I make. A plant that looks like it is ragweed and this has a silvery underleaf and also a really nice smell. Mullen tea and soft toilet paper. If it smells like onion and it tastes like onion it's onion and this is all onion. This is plantago and there's two species plantago major and plantago minor. This is the broad leaf plantain and the other is narrow leaf plantain. So these leaves are very nutritious. They are an edible and they're a medicinal. Something I like to make from this is a poultice. So if I'm stung by a bee a honey bee because I'm a beekeeper I will chew up some of these leaves and stick that where I've been stung and that actually helps when you have skin irritation from insects that have stung you and that's called a poultice. This is poke or pokeweed and it's one of my favorite greens. This is a toxic one that you have to cook and you only eat this when it's in its maristematic growth stage not when the leaves are flat but when it's when the leaves are still pointed upwards and they're young and tender. It's not a banana it's not a mango it's a papa and it's a true treat of the woods. You can tell when papa is ripe by poking it with your finger and if it pushes in just like an avocado when an avocado is ripe that's how you know. Poor man's pepper but my friend Eric Joseph Lewis taught me to call it rich man's pepper and it makes a great pepper substitute. So Chan if you want to eat a lot of greens this is the green for you. Stinging nettle the stings are medicinal and the food is wonderful. Shagbark hickory for making hickory nut milk. Violet which is very mild and makes a great base for a salad. Wild water. Bubble it up from the earth. Wild pears. I don't find a lot of these trees compared to apples but when I do they are abundant. Acorns how you eat them is you have to remove the tannins you can do that through a hot water bath or cold water bath leaching out the tannins and then you get an acorn mash you can dry that into an acorn flower. The acorn also produces the acorn grub a tasty little treat that's a pretty typical size for acorn grubs rich acorny nuttiness that's good grub. The everyday very usual and quite abundant wild chives to be picked from front yards parks and wild spaces all across the land. Here the dandelion stands it's an incredibly resilient plant the leaves are edible the flowers are edible the stem is also edible the milk inside of that edible and then the roots are edible as well. Young and tender amaranth a nutritious and tasty green. Here we have doc and the leaves of doc can be delicious or they can be downright terrible you'll learn the different docs this is the seed head here and often people will use these making crackers and the root of doc can also be roasted just like you would with dandelion to make a root tea. After having apples straight from the land a grocery store apple just feels like a vessel full of water. Apples were one of my absolute staples harvesting dozens and dozens of them sometimes shaking them down from the trees and harvesting the bounty and other times just picking them. My favorite thing to make from apples is of course applesauce eating applesauce every day. Growing up I ate blackberries and raspberries and I didn't even consider it foraging it was just picking berries it's one of the most common things that people forage. Right here I'm with blackberry and this is one of the bramble berries which includes blackberry and raspberry and black raspberry and thimbleberry and salmon berry and there's more but not only are the berries edible on these plants but you can make tea from the leaf raspberry leaf tea is the most popular of all of them and the time that you want to do it is when the leaves are young and tender that's going to make the best tea. Aronia or sometimes called chokeberry not choke cherry chokeberry the best way to work with it is to make a very nutritious rich juice this is a very commonly found landscaping plant so it's perfect for urban foragers butternut a lot like walnut but it's a butternut different flavor different shape but very similar black nightshade few edible plants create so much fear this is a plant that millions believe is deadly yet millions and millions of people have eaten both the leaves and the fruits as staple food for the last hundreds or thousands of years black nightshade berries are incredibly delicious and I enjoy them thoroughly and yet for me to explore is eating the young and tender greens but again something that millions of people around the world enjoy food and medicine is growing freely and abundantly all around us and these plant relatives they are just waiting for us to create relationships with them that will help us break free from the global industrial food system and live in a more harmonious way with the earth with humanity and with all of our plant and animal relatives it starts by learning just one plant at a time and who knows maybe one day you'll never have to take a trip to the grocery store again oh my god that tree is loaded